If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re committed to working your ass off not to be one—which is really the best that any of us can promise), then you must believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on anyone’s success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world, the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some external force is holding certain people back. Like…racism. Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism! Unless you don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if you don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a fucking racist.
– Lindy West, “A Complete Guide to Hister Racism”
This is beyond magical thinking. This is a system of belief that requires you to disregard the evidence of human multiplicity that you observe every minute of every day. Believing in the Tooth Fairy is less nuts than this because not every interaction with another human being offers decisive evidence that there is no Tooth Fairy. Yet absolutely any form of engagement with humans or any part of human culture does definitively and exhaustively demonstrate that we are not born equal in a way that conditions our “success.” Nick Land calls the state in which Lindy West placed herself to write the quoted article “sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances.”
That there is some poor, deluded Lindy West somewhere wouldn’t be important or interesting to discuss. But the quoted belief is now the foundation of a massive quantity of legislation defining much of our lives. People lose their jobs, are hounded out of productive existence, demonetized and demonized for doubting that Lindy’s Gnostic delirium is absolutely, undeniably true.
But that’s not enough. We are dismantling the biggest achievements of our civilization to keep alive the fantasy that anybody can be anything they want. Land wrote before gender theory became enshrined next to disparate impact but we are now seeing how the next stage of the delirium – men can be women can be men can be both – has become not only normalized but shrilly, aggressively dominant.
Falsifying the present, looting the future, sacralizing grievances – be they of the dominant Left or the dissident Right – this is what democracy does. Says Land, because I’m still retelling his book The Dark Enlightenment and will continue to do so in the next post.
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I obviously have not read all your sources so my opinion might not be particularly informed.
To me this sounds like a debate about relative importance of “nurture”and “nature”… And the answer to that debate for me is “obviously both”. And as long as one believes that “nurture” plays a role in one’s success (let’s leave definition of “success” to some other time), then the following questions become legitimate:
a) should the society do something about some groups experiencing, on average, poor “nurture”? And if yes, then what? The answer to this depends on
b) what constitutes “nurture”? Do we just stop at “his/her parents were shitty people” (for unfathomable random-number-generated reasons) or do we explore the reasons they became the way they are? Was there something in their “nurture” that strongly contributed to making them the way they are? Etc.
Believing in all of the above does not require me to believe that with proper nurture I could become Usain Bolt or that Usain Bolt with proper nature could become a Nobel laureate…
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Nick Land dedicates quite a bit of time talking about nature vs nurture in the book. His position is similar to yours in that both matter. However, he doesn’t shy away from exploring the “nature” part of the equation, which you and I do for obvious reasons.
Many social interventions have been done for “some groups” in the past 50 years. The result has been invariably the opposite of the declared. There’s been no observable improvement on crime rates, segregation, test scores, etc. The de-policing measures we’ve been doing since 2020 have had a devastating effect with many unnecessary deaths of precisely the group we’ve been trying to save from the nurture. What now? More social engineering? Of what kind? The same? Something new?
Land says Americans know their social engineering failed and are living in silent desperation on the subject.
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LOL, you don’t suspect that Western civilization might, just might, require patriarchy, the original social engineering ;-D
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Sure, but there is difference between
a) the problem is determined by nurture to a large extent, and describing the nature of the problem as after-effects of racism is ultimately correct but it is impossible to solve this problem by means of social engineering (e.g. because it is impossible to offer high-quality trauma therapy to everyone who needs it, especially if they do not know or do not agree that they need it) and
b) we were not able to solve the problem by social engineering therefore it must be genetic
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If these were truly after-effects of racism, we would see low academic achievement and sky-high violent criminality among Ashkenazi Jews. In reality, though, we see the exact opposite. Which has to mean that after-effects of racism are not a factor in these issues.
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There are fundamental cultural differences between Jews and US Blacks. The Jews are distinct cultural/religious group that believe that they are “chosen” and otherwise superior. The Blacks were brought from many different areas, belonged to different tribes and their skin color is pretty much the only characteristic that unites them. Furthermore, Jews hold (and held) education and other things necessary for “success” (conventionally defined) in high regard. Both these factors are cultural / psychological and not genetic.
(Apologies to everybody who believes in genetic superiority of Jewish people.)
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“Chosen” is in no way superior. It’s chosen for martyrdom, chosen for persecution, chosen to always be the last. We don’t get together and talk about how we are superior, I promise. That would be a very low-IQ thing. 🙂
The argument that Ashkenazi Jews are massively over represented in scholarship because they believe academics to be important is circular thinking. Nobody is preventing other groups from thinking its important. Why don’t they if all you need is to think yourself into academic stardom? Because you can’t think yourself into having longer legs, a better metabolism or a more effective brain. Physiology is real.
Honestly, do you attribute your own intellectual achievements to culture and psychology? I can’t begin to believe that.
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Also, I will never understand why having a higher IQ is translated as superior. Longer legs don’t make you superior. A perfect pitch doesn’t. Even an ideal blood sugar baseline doesn’t. This is simple physiology that nobody earned or merited in any way. I’m deeply envious of my aunts who at 70 have perfect blood sugars while I can’t eat a bloody apple without going into a coma. But it doesn’t make them superior. They are luckier in this one thing. It’s the luck of the draw, exactly like IQ.
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\ Also, I will never understand why having a higher IQ is translated as superior.
This is hard to believe in since the matter seems so obvious to me and imo to most people.
Unlike a perfect pitch or physical attractiveness, intelligence is the key to survival and prosperity in 21st century both on individual and on social level. It is the most important deciding factor on who will be left behind to self-destruct, suffering and confused, and who will “learn to code” and feel at home in Elon Musk’s world.
In addition, once societies drop the religious view of immortal souls making humanity uniquely precious, intelligence is left as The Defining Thing distinguishing us from animals or even plants. Canonization of saints transforms into veneration of technological breakthroughs (and sometimes of people developing them). Think about Starlink and AI, for instance.
If intelligence makes us human, what does it mean to lack it? A disturbing question.
This discussion reminded me of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination with its division into the saved and the damned. They saw “worldly success as a sign that they had been chosen by God.” Well, if it’s impossible to achieve earthly success today without exceptionally high IQ, the remains of old religious beliefs go nicely with today’s secular veneration of intelligence.
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Not having bad blood sugars is also key to survival. Yet we’ve all accepted the genetic basis of diabetes.
Tons of people live happy, productive lives without exceptionally high IQs. Mine is higher than average but definitely not exceptionally high. I know people whose IQ is definitely below average and they are happy, productive, and everything is fine.
Be that as it may, physiology is real and everybody who disregards that is not living in reality but in fantasy land.
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The apartheid was heavily based on Dutch Calvinsim, although success was generally associated with tribe. The most successful had more global ambitions, but they were definitely the ones you wanted on your side.
https://samilhistory.com/2023/10/21/rhetoric-vs-reality-smuts-malan/
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\ “Chosen” is in no way superior. It’s chosen for martyrdom, chosen for persecution, chosen to always be the last.
This is definitely NOT the interpretation among any Israeli Jews, religious or not and, in this matter, our interpretation counts the most. 🙂
I googled in Hebrew and found the religious view of BeitChabad:
Other Israeli Jews, support the ideology of Greater Israel, believing we should annex the Palestinian territories (and may be a few others as well) since God promised us this land.
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I’m very specifically talking about Ashkenazi Jews in North America. Please, let’s leave Israel and Palestine out of this. The topic is already way overburdened. Israel is not showing up on IQ tests as anywhere in the remote vicinity of the Ashkenazi Jew results.
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And by the way, if the discussions of how “we are superior” are supposed to produce great real-life results, then why did the “black girl magic” and “shit white people say” not produce any? Come to that, why don’t we all just tell ourselves we are geniuses and magically increase our IQs this way?
How is this different from “a man is a woman because he says so”?
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\ And by the way, if the discussions of how “we are superior” are supposed to produce great real-life results
Here we fully agree.
\ Please, let’s leave Israel and Palestine out of this.
Agreed. The first quote from BeitChabad isn’t related to Israeli state. It is the traditional religious interpretation, based on Torah.
// I’m very specifically talking about Ashkenazi Jews in North America.
Do you mean that those Jews interpret being Chosen as “chosen for martyrdom, chosen for persecution, chosen to always be the last”? This view of my people feels so wrong to me that I had to react.
Just yesterday I read on Russian telegram channel that Amish and Haredi Jews are two fastest growing populations (by %) in USA. Googled for info in English and saw : “the study predicted that in 2040, one out of every four Jews in Israel and one out of every five Jews in the United States will be Haredi.”
Those Jews are not likely to define being chosen in the way you did.
As for secular American Jews, I am not surprised if they primarily define being Jewish as being a victim of antisemitism. Before immigration I did the same thing.
Ironically, viewing Jews as being ‘chosen for persecution’ has been a very ancient traditional Christian interpretation.
You criticize many modern cultural developments as unhealthy. Imo, if NA Jews see themselves thus, it’s one of unhealthy aspects of life that should be changed asap (as soon as possible).
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I have been present at two scholarly talks so far where the speaker said that “Jews should go back to Europe.” One of the speakers added “they are Europe’s problem, Europe should solve it.”
I can’t begin to imagine an academic telling a large audience (or even whispering into his pillow at night) that “blacks should go back to Africa.” (And he shouldn’t. That’s a disgusting position to take). Yet in the midst of all this, blacks supposedly underachieve because of racist trauma and Jews keep overachieving in spite of it. My close friend was almost denied tenure at our university in the 1980s because the Dean openly said at the tenure council “why do we need any more tenured [slur for a Jew] on campus.” Her parents are Holocaust survivors. Today, she’s hearing she should go back to Europe. Yet all of this did not prevent her from overachieving by every measure. Yes, it’s anecdotal but large group data invariably bear this out.
Leaving aside Jews, what about Ukrainians? We were enslaved until 1861. We’ve had every genocide, including the ongoing. Yet countries that have a large Ukrainian immigrant community (like Canada) observe nothing remotely similar to excessive violent criminality and abysmal test scores.
Curiously, US blacks are doing worse with every single progressive measure introduced to help them. There was nothing like the current 70% illegitimacy rate among black children during the first century after Abolition. To the contrary, black marriage was stronger than white marriage. A hundred years of strong marriages and a journey towards increasing prosperity with each generation. Then progressives come with their social engineering, and suddenly marriage rates plummet, ghettos appear, economic advantages are getting wiped out. And we are sitting here, pretending that progressives really care. They engineered thousands of excess deaths among blacks in 2020. But they trademarked “black girl magic”, so we are supposed to accept that we are racists and they are luminous white saviors. I’m so done with this crap.
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Must be racist trauma:
https://x.com/DataMeijer/status/1875596084946604282?t=7LgOQtWRIzQ9gYR057VcUw&s=19
Being in the top 1% of income earners is notoriously racistly traumatic but only for one group.
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—We don’t get together and talk about how we are superior, I promise.
You do realize that you are not the only Jewish person I know, right?
—Honestly, do you attribute your own intellectual achievements to culture and psychology?
I attribute them to a combination of natural predisposition and to growing up in… not just an educated family. A family that valued education almost above all else, has been very snobbish this way, etc. Not that different from stereotypical Jewish upbringing. This type of upbringing has good sides and bad sides… I doubt that I would achieve the same things if I were born to a family with significantly different values, not including education… Or maybe I would achieve even more if my family were less dysfunctional.
From another angle, I do see a lot of similarities between mainstream proletarian Russian/soviet culture (to which I was exposed outside of the immediate family) and Black culture in the US. I even told my American therapist, only half-jokingly – “imagine I grew up in the Southern Chicago, but in the family of an educated person, for example a high-school teacher”…
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What I don’t understand is why, if valuing education is what it takes, doesn’t everybody simply decide to value it and spare us the bother. If you can think yourself into brilliant academic performance, then anybody should be able to do it.
Or is it the other way round? Do we simply value what we are good at because we are good at it?
I think the idea that you can kind of psych yourself into a better intellectual performance is magical thinking. Why is the NBA so full of black men and so short (no pun intended) on Mexicans? Is it because of their values or their physiology? Why is there such an extraordinary shortage of Mexicans among computer programmers? Because Mexicans have bizarrely chosen not to value programming while Indians and Ukrainians have chosen to value it? Doesn’t that sound very strange?
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One cannot “just decide to value it” one day. And even if one could, one may not know what to do about it and do something counter-productive. One has to grow up in a family that values it (statistically, of course there are exceptions).
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So most people don’t have the intelligence to pursue education in a productive way. Which is exactly my point.
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This is not all of your point. Your point, as it comes across to me from this series of exchanges, is that there is not merely a correlation, but a direct cause and effect relationship between ethnicity/race and intellectual / educational achievements.
I agree with the correlation part, but not with cause and effect relationship. It also seems to me that implying direct cause and effect relationship instead of a correlation is misused by you for the purpose of justifying not looking into other causes of lower educational success of some groups.
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I highly recommend Charles Murray’s book “Facing Reality”. It’s short, won’t take you more than a couple of days. This has all been studied for decades, with pretty much nobody in the disciplines that study it denying the findings.
Otherwise I’m starting to feel like a plagiarist who is stealing other people’s science and getting it attributed to me.
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LOL, just to make complex matters just a little more confusing. DNA is revealing that Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis, as well as Homo erectus interbred, as well another ancient hominid with too few fossils to name found in Denisova cave. All* appear to be fertile crosses, so back in the era where dinosaurs roamed i.e., when I was in school, there should only be a single species: Homo sapiens sapiens…mind you, I always was a lumper, not a splitter ;-D
The wide genetic variation among contemporary human races might quite possibly be attributable to different proportions of those ancient interbreedings scattered across the continents of Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceana.
*There is some question that the crosses with Homo sapiens males and Homo neanderthalensis females were fertile
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“a direct cause and effect relationship between ethnicity/race and intellectual / educational achievements”
Find a more robust social science finding than differences between ethnicity/race and intellectual potential. I dare you. Generations have tried to disprove it and it remains undefeated.
All ‘debunkings’ of these findings amount to “I wish it were different!”
It is what it is.
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